Archaeologists have discovered an old settlement at the site of Montreal’s new Turcot Interchange. The village of Saint-Henri-des-Tanneries was a small leather-works settlement on the outskirts of Montreal during the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Transport Quebec knew about the location of the village of Saint-Henri des Tanneries and had hired archaeologists. Maps archived at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec show that artisans lived where the building foundations were recently discovered.
In the middle of the 1700s, there were eight tanneries, situated outside Montreal because of the strong smell from treating animal skins and leather.
By 1813, the settlement had a chapel school, homes, merchants, and artisans, and the village of Saint-Henri-des-Tanneries was founded. Within ten years, more than half the resident made their living in the leather-tanning industry and the small-scale operations eventually grew into large-scale production facilities.
According to a CBC report, crews with Transport Quebec have found dozens of artifacts dating back to that period.
“They found bottles, they found tools that were used to work on animal skins,” said Martin Girard, a spokesperson with Transport Quebec.
Dinu Bumbaru, policy director with Heritage Montreal, told CBC, “At some point near the turn of the 20th century, the area was paved over and turned into a rail yard. Then of course in the 1960s, they built the Turcot Interchange.”
Mr. Bumbaru says the site offers an important window into the city’s past and that it needs to be preserved in some way.
It will be up to Quebec’s Ministry of Culture to determine whether the artifacts will be made available for the public to see.
You can read more in the CBC report.
My Coultry and Morgen/Magen ancestors were butchers. They had shops in Ste. Anne’s Market, but their slaughterhouses were in Saint-Henri — makes sense, build the abattoirs next to the tanneries that use the hides from the beef carcasses. No doubt the odour over all of Saint-Henri was overpowering!